She flipped over from a half-lotus position, uncoiled her legs into a handstand and then snapped up into a foot grab that would give any contortionist a charley horse. "It's marvelous,'" said Actress Geraldine Chaplin, 22. Charley's daughter started with yoga when she was 13, so her limbs are used to all the pretzeling. "I don't really go beyond the physical side of it," said Geraldine in her Madrid apartment, which she has set up as home base and gymnasium for rest between films. Does the rest include sleeping on nails? "Oh, no," said she. "Maybe broken glass at the end of a wild party."

Terrible was that combat, Horrible, ugly, vast, gigantic, furious, awesome. Arms is a calling that causes many tears.

That kind of literary style is also enough to make a grown man cry, but in this case, the author can be forgiven. After all, Charles de Gaulle, 76, was only 15 years old. Clearly born to the purple, the lad wrote the one-act play, entitled An Unfortunate Encounter, to win a boys' magazine prize for the best playlet in verse. His dream of glory involved the dire meeting of a traveler, a brigand and a gendarme in the forest. After le petit Charles won the prize, Encounter was printed in 50 copies, and now one of them is enshrined in the French National Library. The youthful masterpiece lay buried there, but last week a columnist for Le Figaro learned of another rat-chewed copy, unearthed by a book collector, and brought it to the world's attention.

"There are no secrets in my life," Italian Actress Claudia Cardinale, 29, has been telling the gossip columnists right along. But last week, a couple did come out. For one thing, the eight-year-old boy whom she has constantly identified as her little brother, is her son by an unnamed father. For another, Claudia was secretly married in the U.S. last year to Producer Franco Cristaldi, 42, her longtime friend who has been seeking a church annulment of his first marriage in divorceless Italy.

"She is the best woman poet in English," allowed Poet Robert Lowell. The 400 members and guests of the Poetry Society of America gave out a dithyrambic cheer of agreement as they presented the society's Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement to Marianne Moore, 79. Indeed, one member, Negro Poet Langston Hughes, was feeling so effusive that he followed Lowell to the podium to hymn "this wonderful and lovely lady." Marianne listened with a proud but astonished smile when Hughes, as a gag, pronounced: "I consider her the most famous Negro woman poet in America."

After months of financial headaches caused by faulty estimates of the cost of living in its splendid new $45.7 million house in Manhattan's Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera sounded a few cheerful notes with a report to the annual board meeting that finances now seemed back on the track. There was a new engineer too: Banker George S. Moore, 65, longtime treasurer of the Met, who succeeded Anthony Bliss as president. Moore, who likes to arrive at his office at Manhattan's First National City Bank ahead of the money, took to telephoning Met General Manager Ru dolf Bing by 8:15 a.m. Wailed Bing, after one such early-morning dingaling: "George, please! Why don't you go make your first million for the day before you call me?"

The British are not notably enthralled with Lyndon Johnson. But when iconoclastic Director Joan Littlewood brought Barbara Garson's Mac-Bird to town, the critics threw every pan in the kitchen. After seeing the pseudo-Shakespearean parody about Johnson and the death of President Kennedy, the London Daily Mail's critic growled: "Immeasurably witless rubbish." The London Times sniffed: "It is pointless to get too indignant. The production successfully torpedoes what was already a fragile and leaky craft."

All went smoothly at a rehearsal for the debutantes' benefit fashion show in London, until Arabella Churchill, 17, Randolph's daughter, had to parade onto the runway wearing a silk gown split up the back to reveal its matching pants. "I do not want to show my bottom," snapped Winnie's granddaughter as photographers began shooting the view from the stern. Later, things got even worse when the prankish Duke of Bedford, the show's announcer, peeled off the detachable lower swath of a mink coat Arabella was modeling, leaving her in a sort of mini-fur. "I do not want to be a model!" she cried, bursting into tears. But by afternoon she had calmed down, and swept through the opening show with no tears. She even endured the duke's suave commentary on the fur. "There's nothing like a fur miniskirt," intoned His Grace, "to keep a girl's behind warm."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.